Yet Another Time Tracker, for Basecamp, but Done Right
We’ve tried pretty much every possible time tracking solution that claims to integrate with Basecamp. You can see lots of them here: Basecamp 3 Integrations.
There are obviously even more general purpose time trackers out there. We’ve tried some of them as well.
We’ve used Harvest probably the longest, until just a couple of months ago, when it made no sense for us to keep paying over $100/mo across our team only to capture some basic time logs. (Harvest has a ton of other features we never needed.)
We’ve noticed that all the time trackers that we tried have some or all of the following issues:
- No true, live Basecamp integration: They force you to create yet another account. Their Basecamp integration is either a one-time import or their syncing is often delayed/breaks. Many time trackers target many different project management tools, claiming they integrate with everything, but they end up doing none of the integrations the right way.
- User experience is too complicated: It takes 3–4 clicks to enter one time log (if the projects/sub-projects are already configured). Worst case, you have to configure the project and minute sub-categories under it before being able to enter a basic time log. Many time tracking solutions are so badly designed that they are disorienting and completely unusable.
- Bloated features and insane pricing: Sadly, time trackers with the best user experience also have a ton of features only marginally related to time tracking (expenses, location tracking, billing, scheduling, etc). Bloating their core product, founders justify charging $7–15/user/mo, which just doesn’t scale if your team truly only needs to track time at the high-level and you’re already using Quickbooks, etc. for various other functions. At some point we were paying ~$100/mo for our team, which is not much in the big scheme of things, but is simply unjustified for time logs.
- Privacy & Security is an afterthought: Some time trackers take pride in tracking everything about their users, including location, browsing history, and screen recording. Many don’t go this far, but are still unnecessarily storing lots of the data they import through the Basecamp or other third-party integration. Basecamp founders have highlighted many of the issues with these in their recent blog post: Employee-surveillance software is not welcome to integrate with Basecamp. A true Basecamp integration should not require you to create yet another user account or to grant unfettered access to all of your Basecamp projects, todos, messages, etc.
Anyway, after tolerating third-party time trackers for a couple of years, being a product design & development shop, we finally invested some time and resources to create one that addresses all of the above issues:
- True, live Basecamp integration: no new accounts to create, nothing to sync, nothing to configure
- Zen user experience: log time to any of your Basecamp Projects (and optionally Todo Lists) with 1–2 taps
- Sane pricing: free for 3 projects/3 users, forever; or $15/mo flat, unlimited projects & users
- Total privacy & security: none of your Basecamp data is ever sync’ed or stored — everything comes live from the Basecamp API
We call our time tracker TEAMTIME. Here is a preview of how easy it is to get started tracking time with TEAMTIME without having to complicate your project management process:
You can get your team started on the web or jump straight into the mobile app:
iOS: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/apple-store/id1222445133
Android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.clearbluedesign.teamtime
